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Hi everyone,

What are people doing about PCs still running Windows 7? January is rapidly approaching, when Win 7 support ends. We have about a dozen PCs/laptops still on Win 7 Pro.

Options:

MIcrosoft free upgrade
Microsoft paid upgrade
New PCs
Used PCs
Just remote in to server and don't care about version of Windows
Forget the whole thing and continue Win 7

Thoughts?

Thanks
Gene

I've found free updates sometimes work but not always.

eBay? I've read the licenses from Europe may be legal as they can be surplus, but their status is questionable

So has everyone upgraded everything to Windows 10?

Or just ignoring the whole issue?

Thanks.

Gene

For what it's worth . . .

Page describing the free Microsoft w7-to-w10 in-place upgrade:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/

The link shown on that page was live just now on 2019-08-07:

https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows10

As the page explains, the upgrade is fairly easy and automatic, but something tedious to do on a weekend.

Expect lots of updates and restarts.

Preserves your logons and programs, sometimes complains but updates hardware drivers.

Never hurts to have your original W7 key, either from a sticker or from a key-finding utility.

An image backup from something like the free AOMEI program is also reassuring.

It's worked on a few dozen systems for me, mostly Dells and HP's.

Don't expect the machine to be any faster.

Hi Carl,

Thanks for your thoughts. I actually have the process of the free upgrade down, I have used it on a "test" PC and a laptop, no problems.

My questions concern:

1. How old is "too old"? is a 7 year old PC "too old"? Just in terms of likelihood of component failure.

2. Any problems with activation issues after the fact? I think I saw somewhere where upgraded PCs "lost" their activation after one of the fairly recent Windows updates.

3. Real life, will people continue to use Win 7 after January?

Thanks

Gene

Gene,

I've upgraded my exam rooms Pentium Dual Core PCs ( about 8 years old, Dell Vostro 230, 4 GB RAM), from Win 7 Pro to Win 10 Pro and they are running Amazing charts 10.0.1 just fine. My main computer is much newer and has much better specs / RAM. It is still running Win 7 Pro.

no problems with activation. I did get some valid licenses off eBay. They are for system builders. They require you to overwrite the old system and data, which was fine with me. They were about $30 vs the $180 required for upgrade license (I plan to buy the upgrade license for main computer).

With all the problems Windows 10 updates have had this year, I plan to wait until the last minute to upgrade the main computer.

"Too old" is relative. Anything with a dual core may be acceptable. The faster ones 2.4 and up will make a difference, but I have found the biggest difference in older computers is the hard drive.

SSDs are leaps and bounds faster than old platter drives. Now you can get a 120 or 240 drive for less than $25 it's easy and there is plenty of software to transfer over to the new drive that's free. They will make them much faster. I have converted most if not all my machines over and made my staff happy.

Hi everyone,

I am thinking along the lines of Wendell and Ken as above.

I tried to do some searching for computer failure rates. It does not look like there is a lot of information out there. One article was looking at failure rates of servers, which might roughly parallel PCs, they indicated about a 5% hardware failure in the first year, going up to about 20% in the sixth year. It seems like many of the used PCs available on the eBay or similar are 3 years old. This would suggest they probably have quite a bit of life left in them.

Items that fail most frequently are, not surprisingly, hard drives. However, power supply was #2 on the list. Everything else seemed much less likely. One source indicated that the failure rates for "namebrand" PCs was quite a bit lower than "white box" PCs. I imagine this primarily would reflect power supply problems.

I had put new hard drives in most of our older PCs several years ago. I did look at SSD prices, they have gotten amazingly cheap, they will probably be the next swap out.

I also checked eBay for Windows 10 Pro licensing, as indicated above they can be amazingly cheap. Not really certain about their legality, but if the free upgrade does not work, that is probably the way to go.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

Gene

I agree that due to unstable updates on win 10 , may be advisable to wait
bala

Or should we just wait for Windows 11?????

I remember a while back someone suggested waiting for "AC version 10 on Windows 10". At the time, that seemed so far in the future.

I don't know, think we are at the precipice of the software apocalypse.

Is Microsoft still saying that there will not ever be a successor to Win 10? That it will be upgraded but not replaced?

Not much time left for that. Windows 7 is EOL Jan 14, 2020 (5 months left) If you have Windows 8, you're good until 2023.

I guess it had to happen eventually - time to replace the desktops I bought for the office when we opened, almost 10 years ago. They have definitely served us well.